A speech I (sort of) gave recently

I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at WEEAC in Melbourne this year re vivisection. I departed from the script but my intended speech is below:

....Mahatma Gandhi said "Of all the crimes ever committed against God and his fair creation, vivisection is the blackest." For most of my life vivisection or animal experimentation was something which I did not think of or have any idea about. If I had been asked about it I would have thought that it was a small business in which animals were harmlessly used to help cure diseases by dedicated, altrusitic scientists who were too intelligent, honourable and learned for someone like me to ever question. Even so I would not have agreed with it. It wasn't until as a 19 year old I attended the Healthier Living Show and to my horror saw film of monkeys with electrodes in their exposed brains that the truth started to dawn. I knew that this was wrong and that there could be no excuse for it.

Since then I have seen images of the suffering of animals in labs, corrosives in eyes, stomachs, heads cut off, but while still alive... "If our capacity to imagine could see that which constantly happens in the laboratories of vivisection, our dreams would be disturbed and there wouldn't be another day for us in which we could be happy and serene." Dr Raplh Bircher ("Die drei neuen Gesichter der Vivisektion", in "Der Wendepunkt", March 3, 1963) reprinted in "Holocaust" by Milly Schar-Manzoli p5

and i have seen the suffering of humans dying from cancer, aids, heart disease etc...and for a long time thought that the former was done to prevent the latter, and when someone said 'if you or a loved one had cancer would you still want to save the mice?' I didn't know what to say. But there was a question in the back of mind; if the AE helped humans then why did these diseases continue year after year and increase, why was the planet still polluted, why were carcinogens still produced, teratogens etc. Weren't the animal 'tests' supposed to protect us, wasn't the animal 'research' supposed to cure us? Why were these things continuing and increasing? But surely those people behind closed doors experimenting on animals were too honourable, altruistic, dedicated and intelligent for someone like me to question what they did? Surely they only used animals when necessary, looked after them, used anaesthetic and these experiments protected us from harmful substances and cured human disease?

The truth was the exact opposite of what I had been lead to believe in every respect. Animal 'testing', the poisoning and blinding of millions of animals was not protecting our health..."Uncritical reliance on the results of animal tests can be dangerously misleading and has cost the health and lives of tens of thousands of humans." Handbook of Laboratory Animal Science Volume II Animal Models, p4, Svendensen and Hau (Eds) (CRC Press).1994 Given substances are not necessarily carcinogenic to all species. Studies show that 46% of chemicals found to be carcinogenic in rats were not carcinogenic in mice. [23] · DiCarlo DrugMet Rev,15; p409-131984. "Experiments on animals do not only mean torture and death for the animals, they also mean the killing of people. Vivisection is a double-edged sword." - Major R.F.E. Austin, M.D., 1927, Royal College of Surgeons, Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. "The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn't work, it has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that." - Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., 1986, Head of the Licensing Board for the State of Illinios, paediatrician & gynaecologist for 30 years, medical columnist & best-selling author, recipient of numerous awards for excellence in medicine. "Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it." - Dr. A. Sabin, 1986, developer of the oral polio vaccine. "My own conviction is that the study of human physiology by way of experimenting on animals is the most grotesque error ever committed in the whole range of human intellectual activity." - Dr. G.F. Walker, 1933. "Why am I against vivisection? The most important reason is because it's bad science, producing a lot of misleading and confusing data which pose hazards to human health. It's also a waste of taxpayer's dollars to take healthy animals and artificially and violently induce diseases in them that they normally wouldn't get, or which occur in different form, when we already have the sick people who can be studied while they're being treated." - Dr. Roy Kupsinel, M.D., 1988, medical magazine editor, USA. "Animal model systems differ from their human counterparts. Conclusions drawn from animal research, when applied to human beings, are likely to delay progress, mislead, and do harm to the patient. Vivisection, or animal experimentation, should be abolished." - Dr. Moneim Fadali, M.D., 1987, F.A.C.S., Diplomat American Board of Surgery and American Board of Thoracic Surgery, UCLA faculty, Royal College of Surgeons of Cardiology, Canada. " Poor replication of even high-quality animal studies should be expected by those who conduct clinical research. Drs Hackam & Redelmeier, Journal of the American Medical Association, October 11, 2006, Vol 296, No. 14 1731-1732.There's no scientific basis for it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't." (Commenting on the FDA's historic requirement to test drugs on animals before humans) Dr Carl Peck, director of the University of California, San Francisco's Center for Drug Development Science and former head of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, San Francisco Business Times, 20th January.

even primates are of no value for human medical research or testing..."Drugs known to damage the human foetus are found to be safe in 70% of cases when tried on primates." Developmental Toxicology: Mechanisms and Risk, p313, McLachlan, Pratt, and Markert (Eds). 1987

So far over 80 AIDS vaccines have been successful in primates, none of them have worked in humans.

To wit; "More than 800 chemicals have been defined as teratogens in laboratory animals, but only a few of these, approximately 20, have been shown to be teratogenic in humans. This discrepancy can be attributed to differences in metabolism, sensitivity and exposure time." Schmid, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, vol 8, p 133. (That is a failure rate of 97.5%)Dr Sharratt, British Petroleum "As an index of acute toxicity, this (LD50) is valueless."D. Lorke, Institute of Toxicology, Bayer, AG "…even if the LD50 could be measured exactly and reproducibly, the knowledge of its precise numerical value would barely be of practical importance, because an extrapolation from the experimental animals to man is hardly possible."

"The predictive reliability of this technique has been questioned and its use on living animals has been criticized." (Beecham Products Research Dept.) "…the rabbit eye is structurally and physiologically different from the human eye." (Johnson and Johnson) "As an ophthalmologist in the New York University I am surprised that the Draize eye irritation test is done at all... I know of no case in which an ophthalmologist found Draize data useful." (Stephen Kaufman, M.D., New York.) "The results of these tests are of no use to physicians." (Sandra Davies, M.D., Columbia, Maryland.) "The results of these (animal) tests cannot be used to predict toxicity or to guide therapy in human exposure." (Christopher D. Smith, M.D., Longbeach, California.) "The data produced by these tests don't keep harmful products from being sold." (Ellen Michael, M.D., Beverley Shores, Indiana.) "After intensive study of the issue, I am convinced that the Draize eye irritancy and the Lethal Dose 50 tests are inaccurate, unreliable, costly and cruel to the animals. The tests deceive the very consumers whom they are supposed to protect, by certifying as SAFE household products and cosmetics that cause two hundred thousand hospital-recorded poisonous exposures annually." (Paula Kislak, D.V.M., Sherman Oaks, California.) "As a practising physician who is Board certified in internal medicine and oncology, I can find no evidence that the Draize test, L.D. 50 test, or any other tests using animals to support the 'safety' of chemicals and cosmetics have any relevance to the human species. I strongly support legislation that prohibits the use of such animal tests by industry." (Donald C. Doll, M.D., Columbia, Missouri, 1988.) Also see www.vivisectioninformation.com www.safermedicines.org www.mrmcmed.org www.speakcampaigns.org www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr www.pcrm.org

and it was not helping to cure disease either... "The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans." Dr Richard Klausner, Director, National Cancer Institute, LA Times, May 6.'Lab mice...have responded quite well to an experimental Alzheimer's vaccine...Lab rats with paralyzing spinal-cord injuries have walked again...And we've cured cancer in enough rodents to fill several New York City subway systems.For people, however, there is no cure for spinal-cord injury, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, osteoporosis, brain and other cancers...the list goes on....” (Sharon Begley, 'Research lags due to few physician-scientists', Wall Street Journal, 25 April 2003).

8. In Tamoxifen’s case, a drug first developed as a potential contraceptive languished for many years before its present application was found. Furthermore, its propensity to cause liver tumours in rats, a toxicity problem that thankfully does not carry over into humans, was not detected until after the drug had been on the market for many years. If it had been found in preclinical testing, the drug would almost certainly have been withdrawn from the pipeline. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2003; 2:167

9. "The fundamental problem in drug discovery for cancer is that the model systems are not predictive at all" Science 1997;278 Nov 7 1997 p1041

10. I looked into all claimed historical breakthroughs attributed to vivisection and these were also outright lies, relying on fallacious forms of argument. Vivisection had delayed all medical benefits to humans and the vivisectors were relying on the fact that animal experiments had occurred to suggest that there was a causal relation between vivisection and human health. this was the exact opposite of the truth. Our most important medicine, penicillin was delayed by 29 years as it was ineffective in rabbits, the polio vaccine by 25 years, diabetes research was thrown off track for decades, the list goes on. To quote Sir Alexander Fleming; "What a fortunate thing that we didn't have these animal tests in the 1940's for penicillin would probably never have been granted a license and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realised." This caused me to wonder why vivisection would continue when it was such an apalling failure. It was not until later that I learned the real reason for so called animal 'tests'...

"Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is meaningless." Dr James D Gallagher, head of medical research at Lederle Laboratories

German researchers Drs H and M Stiller, "In praxis, all animal experiments are scientifically indefensible, as they lack any scientific validity and reliability in regard to humans. They only serve as an alibi for the drug manufacturers, who hope to protect themselves thereby". Peter Tatchell, "Animal Research Is Bad Science", 2001.

"The growing opposition to vivisection is understandable both on ethical and biological counts. However, a certain scientistic culture says they serve to save human lives. But reality is quite the opposite. Let's take the case of pesticides. These dangerous products, used in agriculture, are classified according to their acute toxicity, graduated with the Lethal Dose 50% tests on animals. This represents not only a useless sacrifice of animals, but it's an alibi that enables the chemical industry to sell products which are classified as harmless or almost harmless, but are in reality very harmful in the long run, even if taken in small doses. Many pesticides classified as belonging to the fourth category, meaning they can be sold and used freely, have turned out to be carcinogenic or mutagenic or capable of harming the fetus. Also in this case, animal tests are not only ambiguous, but they serve to put on the market products of which any carcinogenic effect will be ascertained only when used by human beings - the real guinea-pigs of the multinationals. And yet there are laboratory tests that can be used, which are cheaper and quicker than animal tests; in vitro tests on cell cultures, which have been proving their worth for years already. But the interests of the chemical industries which foist on us new products in all fields may not be questioned." - Prof. Gianni Tamino, 1987, biologist at Padua University, a Congressman in the Italian Parliament

"Since there is no way to defend the use of animal model systems in plain English or with scientific facts, they resort to double-talk in technical jargon...The virtue of animal model systems to those in hot pursuit of the federal dollars is that they can be used to prove anything - no matter how foolish, or false, or dangerous this might be. There is such a wide variation in the results of animal model systems that there is always some system which will 'prove' a point....The moral is that animal model systems not only kill animals, they also kill humans." - Dr. Irwin Bross, Ph.D., 1982, former director of the largest private cancer research institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering Institute, then Director of Biostatics, Roswell Memorial Institute, Buffalo, NY.

Dr Ralph Haywood, director of medical research at HLS "The best guess for the correlation of adverse reactions between human and animal toxicity data is somewhere between 5% and 25%" and "90% of our work is done for legal and not for scientific reasons."

ALTERNATIVE METHODS - TO WHAT?by Prof Pietro CroceAre there methods that offer an alternative to vivisection or animal experimentation? Certainly not! Then why this book? And why the public outcry against the vivisectors? And the refusal, by a growing number of students and researchers, to carry out animal experiments? And the indictments and court sentences against the researchers?*This argument, like all intellectual forms of expression, requires a semantic premise. The precise reason why we say that there is no 'alternative' to vivisection is that a method which aims at replacing another should have the same characteristics. But it would be difficult to find, in the field of biomedical research, anything equally bogus, deceitful and misleading as vivisection has been in the past and continues to be in the present. That's why the methods proposed to biomedical research should be called 'scientific methods' and not 'alternative methods'.The vivisectors ask us: 'What do you offer to Science in the place of vivisection?' - 'In the place of vivisection, nothing: for vivisection is a festering sore which makes Science sick and gives it a bad name, even among the general public'. Actually, the vivisectors should not ask us, 'What are you offering to Science?', but, more honestly, 'What are you offering to us?''To be sure, without animal experimentation the vivisectors would lose the opportunity of reaping, with no talent and little effort, academic titles and honors, of publishing papers, making money and pursuing a glittering career. They would also have to waive the chance to curry the favors of the Powers-that-be by supporting one thesis one day and the opposite thesis the next, with the same persuasiveness - all this on the strength of allegedly 'irrefutable' animal experiments, and according to what result has been requested by whoever foots the bill.There are endless possibilities for producing irrefutable evidence in support of any theory, through the use of various animal species; all one has to do is to select the appropriate species.

So I, and the public had been fooled. We had been fed the line "What would you rather it be, your child or a dog" when the truth was it was the child and the dog and the planet who sufferred. The so called animal 'tests' misleading and variable data provides legal protection to industries whose products kill and harm humans and once we are suffering from over 30,000 diseases as we are now the fraudulent so called 'medical research' based on animals provided hope but no cures to a single human disease and provided ongoing income to the disease business. To quote George Bernard Shaw; "Whoever does not hesitate to vivisect will hardly hesitate to lie about it."

We are lied to not only by the drug and chemical companies but by the government, media, educational system and by certain philosophers, promoted through the media and the worlds universities who do not challenge the claim that humans benefit from animal experiments while real anti vivisectionists such as Hans Ruesch are persecuted to the grave.

We have powerful enemies but an even more powerful argument. "All the darkness in the world cannot put out the light of a single candle." The truth about vivisection is a candle and it burns the lies of the vivisectors. We only need to use this argument and to show what is happening to animals for the public to demand an end to all vivisection. Sites such as www.safermedicines.orgwww.vivisectioninformation.comwww.mrmcmed.org and others will help us do it.

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has been involved in animal issues for 22 years since seeing a film of monkeys in brain research in 1988. Animal experimentation has been the area which concerns Douglas the most but he has been involved in all types of animal issues over that time. Douglas will be a regular contributor to Viva la Vegan! and hopes that he can help people to use the most effective anti-vivisection arguments and action. Contact Doug
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